Newscaster notes that Bugsy Bernanke's Weimar Project (alias QE2) ends this morning, and asks "Did it help the US economy?"

Fantastically stupid question.

QE was never meant to help the American economy.

Bugsy himself has told us that his sole purpose was to raise share prices in the Jew Casino. In other words, Capo of Jew Mafia steals trillions from Americans (via inflation) to reward other members of Jew Mafia for helping him collapse America. That's all.

Tuned into Rush for a minute this morning to see how Goldman Sachs Red Label sounds lately. Rush was screeching in some kind of beyond-melting-point apoplexy because Obama dared to propose taxing Rush's private fleet, which is apparently larger and faster than America's measly little air force.

Thanks, Rush. I've been in a pox-on-both-houses mood for many years, unwilling to vote for either of the Goldman Sachs "parties". Now I'm going to vote for Obama next time around, solely and exclusively to insure that your private fleet of Gulfstream 9999999xi.562XXXP's (or whatever they are; presumably you own the model that isn't yet available to mere rich mortals) are taxed a few dollars more than they otherwise would have been. I'm sure you won't pay the tax anyway, because paying taxes is something that only tiny minuscule microscopic LOSERS LOSERS LOSERS NYAH NYAH NYAH have to do.

Rush, you just gave me a reason to vote for Goldman Sachs Blue Label. Thanks, Oh Great One. You've turned a non-voter into an Obama voter, you grotesque monstrous evil schoolyard bully.

Polistra has always been a fan of Sam Brownback, though it's probably good that he didn't make it to the Presidency. Now it looks like Brownback is fulfilling his promise as Kan gov in a serious way! He's using all the legally available machinery of the state to make abortuaries get the hell out of Dodge. Or rather out of KCK and Overland Park, since that's where all three remaining murder mills are.

A father-daughter physician team is going to court to stop the state from imposing new rules that could potentially leave the state abortion free by the end of the week.

Herbert Hodes and his daughter, Traci Nauser, filed a lawsuit in federal court asking a judge to stop the new licensing requirements from going into effect on July 1.

Hodes and Nauser run an Overland Park obstetrics and gynecological clinic that also provides abortion services. It is one of three abortion clinics in the state that face the prospect of not getting a license by the time the new regulations start on Friday.

Hodes and Nauser run the Center for Women’s Health, which was scheduled to be inspected Wednesday. The clinic canceled the inspection thinking it wouldn’t be approved for a license anyway.

Contending that the rules in the new law are overly burdensome and impose a “number of ambiguous and unclear requirements,” the physicians are asking a judge to issue a preliminary injunction barring the state from moving ahead.

Neat idea. A state unquestionably has an obligation to regulate public health. Abortuaries are by definition unhealthy for babies, to put it mildly. So a rational public health law should prohibit abortuaries.

Remains to be seen what the judge will do; most likely will grant the injunction, especially since the Hodes clan of KC is rich, well-connected and hardass Commie. But judges in the Midwest aren't always predictable, so we can hope and pray.

= = = = =

Update end of June 30: It appears that the judge did not issue an injunction, so the law goes into effect. Two of the three clinics have been denied a license to operate. According to LifeNews, the Kansas law was written to follow precedents of previous Federal "court" "decisions"; which may explain why the latest black-robed saboteur was hesitant to issue an emergency injunction.

Polistra and Happystar salute Kansas for the second time this year.

= = = = =

Update again, 5 PM July 1: Well, no surprise after all. A black-robed Satanist has done the predictable thing a day late. Black-robed Satanist Carlos Murguia has "granted" a preliminary injunction to Comrade Hodes. However, this doesn't guarantee a final invalid and illegitimate Federal "overruling" of the state in the end, since another black-robed Satanist somehow accidentally approved a nearly identical law in South Carolina.

The story is simple: when evil persecutors started to lose their bizarre fraudulent 'molestation' cases, when the vast majority of such 'cases' were shown to be a well-organized criminal conspiracy among persecutors and social workers, the persecutors had to invent a new way to destroy ordinary people, a new way to serve Lenin and Satan. So they invented 'shaken baby syndrome'. Great success for the persecutors! Win every case! None of that bothersome old evidence needed! Just make the accusation and you magically get a conviction for the ordinary parents, and re-election for your glorious majestic bi-winning self!

NPR talks to many of the victims of the fraud, and also finds some honest doctors who state flatly that it's impossible to produce those symptoms by shaking. Most of the symptoms have turned out to be a wide variety of skin conditions or perinatal brain damage, perhaps indicating neglect but not violence. In other words, some of those parents should have lost custody, but none of them belonged in jail for murder.

Listening again to 'On Point' on NPR. As usual the program has well-informed experts and callers above the mindless-partisan pay grade. Topic today is the silly War Powers Act.

Seems to be general agreement that Libya never posed a military threat, thus doesn't justify any military action. They're right about that.

Also general agreement that modern threats were not foreseen by the 1787 constitution, thus need new arrangements.

Nonsense. We've only redefined a range of hostile actions that were perfectly well-known back then. Before BushBushObama's insatiable compulsion to send soldiers and contractors everywhere, such hostile actions were called sabotage or espionage or mail fraud, and weren't intended to be answered with soldiers.

Admittedly those actions are vastly easier to accomplish in mass quantities via the Web, but that doesn't turn them into war. They're still mostly sabotage, and the appropriate response (or prevention) is still counter-sabotage. Stuxnet is an excellent example of counter-sabotage, following a pattern that Reagan's CIA used against Russian oil production facilities.

Two in three - including nearly half of Republicans - say the rich benefit most from the federal government's policies. More than seven in ten say special interest groups and large corporations have too much influence on American life.

Similarly, Americans have long felt they have little say in government. But the trends are troubling: While 58 percent said they have little say in what government does in 1990, that figure has risen to 69 percent today. In the new survey, 85 percent say that people like them had too little influence on American life.

Not that it matters... by definition the ruling class no longer has or needs the consent of the governed. Still, I'm glad we're drowning with our eyes open.

Superstition always bites. Last week I was cheerfully nattering about beneficial exercise after a month of rejuvenating the back yard.

Yesterday, while breaking up some roots, my lower back announced it was TIME TO STOP.

It's a familiar pain. Happens about twice a year since 1975, when I snapped a tendon or something while lifting a heavy object at work. Most of the time it starts without any obvious cause, presumably from stress or bad posture. At least this time I know why it happened. Typically it fades in a week if I stay loose and walk a lot.

However: the newly planted clover is starting to pop its little heads through the soil! Makes the pain worthwhile. Almost.

When a 43-foot gray whale was spotted off the Israeli town of Herzliya last year, scientists came to a startling conclusion: It must have wandered across the normally icebound route above Canada, where warm weather had briefly opened a channel three years earlier.

On a microscopic level, scientists also have found plankton in the North Atlantic where it had not existed for at least 800,000 years.

The whale’s odyssey and the surprising appearance of the plankton indicate a migration of species through the Northwest Passage, a worrying sign of how global warming is affecting animals and plants in the oceans as well as on land.

Silly study.

How do they know the whale didn’t swim around Tierra del Fuego, which is always open? Whales pass through the Strait of Magellan often enough that it’s a regular ecotourist destination.

Cliff Mass points out in astonishing terms why we have record-breaking floods now. The midwinter snowpack in the northern mountains was huge but not egregious; generally two or three times the average. But the remaining snowpack as of late June is way way way way way beyond record-breaking. In some places it's FOUR HUNDRED TIMES the average. That's not a misprint, and it's not 400% of average, which would mean four times average, it's FOUR HUNDRED TIMES the average.

Spring is what really made the difference. Almost every day was colder and wetter than average. In Spokane we didn't lose frosty mornings until late May, and we've only had three days over 70. Normally we'd be in the upper 70s by now, with many days breaking 80.

Seems to me that Spokane could bring in some ND refugees and businesses. ND has bad winters and bad summers; we have bad winters and beautiful summers.

Here's a song the Chamber of Commerce could use if they wanted to sound really dumb:

We got snowstorms in the winter, we got windstorms in the fall;We got thunder in the springtime, but our summer's best of all.We got colleges and industries and bikers wearing studs;What ain't we got? We ain't got floods!

[Strictly speaking that's not quite true; the Spokane River does run over its banks nearly every Spring. But the topography is such that it hardly matters. Only a few parks and a few dozen houses are "down by the riverside", and those homeowners know what they're doing.]

Old saying: The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.

In the post-1989 world lots of things are getting sorted out. Arbitrary nation-states formed in 1920 are breaking up into more natural ethnic groupings. Large and destructive organizations like EU and NATO are breaking up. Secular rulers whose existence depended on playing US/USSR games are being overthrown.

Swift and strong are gaining new definitions.

Formerly: Strong meant tied closely to US or USSR. Swift meant able to manipulate US and USSR to get what you want.

Now: Strong means ethnically united. Strong means you're not self-flagellated by the Gramscian whips of Diversity and Sensitivity. Your government can operate with the consent of the people because the people have one culture, a culture that knows and enforces the difference between right and wrong.

Swift means got nuclear power and to a lesser extent got coal. Nations that rely on oil will fade, because the easy oil is gone and the remaining oil will get more expensive every year. Relying on oil means relying on speculators. Coal will be abundant for a much longer time, but it's nowhere near as efficient as nuclear fission in terms of material usage. And of course, fucking idiot Gaian countries who believe they can rely on hippie-dippie shit like windmills are already realizing it's a fraud, though Wall Street is trying to keep the crime running as long as possible.

New Superstitionist sorts out the swift from the slow, though they're predictably betting backwards.

So does Fukushima mean a decade-long revival of interest in nuclear power is grinding to a halt?

IAEA figures suggest not. They list 65 reactors under construction, and those figures are just the tip of the iceberg because they do not include reactors that are contracted to be built, or those being planned. Neither do they acknowledge the significance of the United Arab Emirates being on course to become the first country to go nuclear since China in 1985: the UAE has signed a deal with a consortium led by the Korea Electric Power Corporation to build four reactors. Saudi Arabia is following suit, having announced earlier this month that it will build 16 reactors by 2030. Turkey plans to build two new plants.

That second group includes Egypt, which ... is the most likely to gain nuclear power of the five north African countries with stated intentions. Continuing political uncertainty in Egypt makes nuclear an unlikely option there in the near term, however.

And of course France is holding firm in both ethnic unity and nukes, and will benefit hugely from the Gaian idiocy of Germany and Britain.

People who have had obesity-related type 2 diabetes for years have been cured, at least temporarily, by keeping to an extreme, low-calorie, diet for two months, scientists report today.

The discovery, reported by scientists at Newcastle University, overturns previous assumptions about type 2 diabetes, which was thought to be a lifelong illness.

The results of the Newcastle investigation, though the study was small, demonstrated that full recovery was possible, not through drugs but through diet.

Eleven people with diabetes took part in the study, which was funded by Diabetes UK. They had to slash their food intake to just 600 calories a day for two months. But three months later seven of the 11 were free of diabetes.

The research, presented today at the American Diabetes Association conference, shows that an extremely low-calorie diet, consisting of diet drinks and non-starchy vegetables, prompts the body to remove the fat clogging the pancreas and preventing it from making insulin.

In other words, adult-onset diabetes just needs some Drano in the right pipes.

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12 hours later: Still no American media coverage for this. I figured I'd have to delete the entry because it would look silly amid all the major coverage. Nope. Dead silence so far.

As with the Canadian Cancer Cure, this is a NON-STORY for the American Satanist-Leninist Poison Pushers. Why? (1) It's an actual cure for a deadly disease, not a way to keep the disease going forever. (2) It's something you can do yourself, absolutely free. Better than free, because you eat less than usual for a while! No way for any company to make even a small profit.

Therefore it is an Unstory, goes straight down the Memory Hole. The only medical stories we "need to know" are grotesquely expensive brand-name drugs that you have to take for the rest of your life.

Jesus save us. Allah save us. I don't give a fuck. Any port in a storm.

Now that Gregoire is retiring as Wash gov, the likely candidates are current Congressman Inslee for brand-D and current state atty gen Rob McKenna for brand-R. Both are weak and slippery in comparison to the Iron Lioness Gregoire.

I've always been ... bemused? ... by McKenna. He reminds me of Calif cong Darrell Issa. Both are capable of being tough and unyielding, which is a good quality, but both always pick the oddest things to get tough about. Issa can doggedly pursue a bad witness in hearings on corruption, but his pursuit leads to an incomprehensible place.

Earlier, McKenna appeared to consider the "integrity" of the state's open-meetings law more important than the lives of people who were threatened by leftist activists. He pursued the case all the way up to the Supremes, successfully guaranteeing a complete loss of privacy by non-leftists.

Rob McKenna became president of the National Association of Attorneys Generals, currently meeting in Chicago. McKenna has unveiled a nationwide campaign to crack down on human trafficking.

The initiative encourages attorneys general across the country to speak out against human trafficking and push for tougher punishments within their states.

WHAT? Is that really the most important problem we have? Does that really require the full attention of all state governments? As far as I can tell, it's only a problem in California, with Chinese and Filipino sweatshops. Not significant elsewhere.

The Carbon Cult has quite effectively used the wildly abundant "endangered" polar bears as emotional symbols of the HEAT HOLOCAUST!!!!!

The realists have tried to counter this with real facts about polar bears: constantly increasing, not decreasing. Far from endangered and getting farther every day.

Raw facts aren't very effective. With some clever marketing, the symbol could be turned around.

As we move into the next Ice Age, which is a damn good prediction from actual facts, polar bears will spread into larger and larger parts of the North American continent.

And polar bears are not cute. They're just as fierce as any other bear. Also, they're white, which is viewed as an evil color by leftists and Chinese. They are KKK Bears, Skinhead Bears, Biker-gang Bears, Sarah Palin Bears, Whitey Bulger Bears, Color-Of-Death Bears! Oooooohhh!!! Boogeybear deluxe!

I get fucking tired of the constant fucking chorus of "Nobody could have anticipated this! Utterly unprecedented! Took us totally by surprise!" We heard it with 9/11, we heard it with the Goldman Coup of 2008, and we're hearing it now about the floods and tornados that inevitably result from a long cold winter in the North.

In this case the astonishment isn't quite as loud, because the Corps of Engineers did a good job of preparing for the floods after the snowpack was already large. But there was plenty of valid warning beforehand, all totally ignored by the fucking idiot ruling class.

Here we go. We spike this up. And now we’re into a major La Nina that’s going to last for the next couple of years. When we come out of that, there’s really good reason to believe the winter of 2012-13, and perhaps beyond, is going to be quite cold.

No fucking excuse for not listening to him. He's been right most of the time.

Well, of course we do know the excuse, don't we? There will be no more cold winters, no more snow. Children in Britain will no longer know what snow is. Every fucking body knows this. Gaia said it, I believe it, that settles it.

Back in April I had the Pine Weapons removed from my tiny yard, which eliminated a source of windborne fear and also a source of crowding and mess.

Having four constantly shedding trees in a 30 x 50 space made it hard to maintain, and I had acquired a sort of phobia about the yard because it reminded me of near-deadly attempts to fight ice dams on the back roof in -10 weather.

So, a fresh start. No new pine crap falling on ground and roof from now on. But there was a decade-long accumulation of existing pine crap, plus a fresh mess caused by the tree cutters. Their stump-grinding process left four holes and four mounds of wood chips mixed with soil.

I could afford to hire a lawn service to clean it out fast, but decided to do it myself for several reasons: exercise, breaking the phobia, and sense of pride. Something like the old common law / common sense doctrine of adverse possession: you don't own a property fully unless you're defending it from human and natural enemies.

Each week's work was limited by the volume of the city's yard-waste container, which was fine; I wanted the work to be rationed so it would last a while, give me a good chance to get re-acquainted with the space.

Yesterday I finally finished the hard part, and the goals are achieved. The exercise built up my upper body and strengthened my back. At the age of 61, I have perceptible biceps muscles for the first time! (Back in the '70s I did a lot of physical work, but I was eating hippie food which didn't allow muscles to develop.) And the sense of pride did in fact overcome the old phobia. Now I can't wait to get out there and continue planting, watering and trimming.

Envision is the same Gaian cadre that tried to institute the Mother Earth Bill of Rights here in Spokane a couple years ago. These loons are talking full-on revolution, in somewhat careful language.

One bit of inside info caught my attention. I was trying to take a nap and couldn't get up quickly to do a fresh transcription, but here's a close-enough sense of the conversation:

"Bill McKibben and Jim Hansen are really dark in private conferences and dinners and so on. Hansen is saying there's absolutely no hope, we're completely sunk. McKibben is saying the same. But both of them are bright and sunny in public, trying to sound hopeful to get what they want from Congressmen and such, trying to work within the system. ... I wish McKibben would sound the alarm more in public. We need to have the pure science out there more, so more people would see how desperate the situation is."

"I believe it is time for President Obama to begin a substantial and responsible reduction in our military presence in Afghanistan. I believe it is time for us to rebuild America, not Afghanistan."

And Comrade McCain, Ho's favorite ho, responded:

"I feel compelled to respond to the statements by the senator from West Virginia, which characterized the isolationist, withdrawal, lack-of-knowledge-of-history attitude that seems to be on the rise in America.

In case the senator from West Virginia forgot it or never knew it, we withdrew from Afghanistan one time. We withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban came, eventually followed by Al Qaeda, followed by the attacks on the United States of America."

= = = = =

First of all, Mr Learn-From-History, we didn't "withdraw from Afghanistan" the first time, because we weren't in Afghanistan the first time. We were playing proxy games, funding and supporting Sheikh Osama and other warlords against the Soviets.

Second, Mr Learn-From-History, the overwhelming lesson of history is that nobody has ever succeeded in controlling Afghanistan.

Third, the Taliban had only a marginal connection with the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 boys were mostly funded and controlled from Germany and Pakistan, and trained in Florida, Oklahoma and Arizona. The Taliban were just one of several groups and nations that helped al-Qaeda at the time.

Fourth, the 9/11 attacks COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED AT ALL if we'd been isolationist at the time. If we had strictly controlled our borders and ports, if we had carefully screened visas and prevented entry by all foreigners with the slightest hint of hostile tendencies, the 9/11 boys couldn't have BEEN HERE, thus couldn't have trained in Florida and Oklahoma, couldn't have recruited foreign helpers at Logan Airport, couldn't have boarded with a one-way ticket paid in cash.

This is somewhat triggered by previous entry about hard vs soft Communism. Not really new, just something I've been constantly puzzled about.

Rezident Bush The Father was the 'closer' in the sequence of Communist takeover from 1948 to 1988. Nearly all his major actions were consistent with that role:

1. Tried to assassinate Reagan, the last serious anti-Communist. Narrowly and miraculously failed.

2. Ran a useless and consumptive war in Iraq that served only to strengthen the 'enemy' leader. Set up the template for the permawars of Rezident Bush The Son and Rezident Obama.

3. After the Rodney King riot in Los Angeles, insured that black gangsters were officially empowered and any police attempt to stop black gangsters was officially condemned. Standard Leninist procedure to keep normal people confused and weak.

4. ADA created a new privileged Victim Class, encouraging disabled folks to stop working and start serving the Party.

5. Clean Air Act gave the marauding EPA terrorist army all the power it needed to SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH American business and agriculture.

6. Appointed Commiefag David Souter to Supreme Court, where he followed Party line perfectly. (We were supposed to believe that Commiefag Souter's leftist record was a 'surprise' to Rezident Bush The Father; that lie was quickly exposed.)

But what about the single exception? What about Clarence Thomas? He's one of the few open heterosexuals in DC, one of the few loyal Americans in DC, and absolutely the solitary unique one and only government official who reads and understands and obeys the Constitution. Nobody else has even read it.

Did Rezident Bush The Father think Thomas was a weak-minded jigaboo who would be easy to blackmail? The business with Commiedyke Anita Hill was obviously an attempt to create a permanent threat, a pubic hair that could be pulled any time Thomas deviated from Party orthodoxy. But it didn't work. Thomas has simply ignored the threat.

Whatever the reason for Bush's error, I thank God for Clarence Thomas and his unwavering quiet moral strength.

One of Polistra's frequent themes is learning from ex-Soviets like Dmitri Orlov and Vaclav Klaus. Eastern Europe learned about Communists the hard and lethal way, directly experiencing a quick change from normal national culture to hard Stalinism in 1948, then a quick change back to normal national culture in 1989. The Commie period was short enough that both changes were within living memory for many people, so there was no need to trust verbal reminiscences.

Here in the Anglosphere we've had a much slower and more confusing shift, which is still progressing apace.

In 1948 Stalin began to subvert government, education and media. Initially there was a healthy immune response by other parts of government. In 1954 the immune system was destroyed by the Army-McCarthy trial. Since then the Commies have been able to instantly stop any immune response in its tracks. McCarthyite, racist, homophobe, etc. You know the drill.

The confusing part happened in 1968 when the Left switched from Marxism-Leninism to Gramscian-Leninism. Marx's nominal goal of flattening the wealth curve was replaced by Gramsci's goal of putting all the wealth and power in the hands of the elite. Leninism, a set of tools to smash normal human culture, remains as the operational part.

Most low-level "conservatives" still don't understand this switch, which means they are unable to fight it effectively. Most "conservative" leaders (the Bush family, McCain, Romney, etc) are Gramscians. They prefer to have the peons thinking in terms of Marx because this makes it easier for the brand-R Gramscians to compete with the brand-D Gramscians. We call you Marxists, you call us Fascists, but we're all Leninists under the T-shirts. More to the point, we're all Goldman.

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Current news brings us an encouraging report of another unconfused Soviet-bloc politician who is finally in a position to make a real difference. Unlike Vaclav Klaus, whose office is ceremonial, Janusz Lewandowski of Poland is the head of the Budget Committee of the EU. He is thus able to shape the actual agenda by controlling the money.

The row among the Conservatives reflects a wider disagreement within the EU over toughening the carbon targets. Although more than 70 large businesses, including Google, Unilever and Scottish and Southern Energy, recently came out in favour of the stiffer cuts, many business lobby groups oppose them.

The move comes as EU environmental policy was undermined by one of the most important figures in the European commission, causing alarm in Brussels. Janusz Lewandowski, the commissioner in charge of fraught negotiations on the future of the EU's €130bn budget, cast doubt on the science of climate change and the future of emissions policy.

In an interview with a Polish newspaper he said: "We already have overambitious agreements on CO2 emission reduction. There is a notion that the thesis that coal energy is the main cause of global warming is highly questionable. Moreover, more and more often there is a question mark put over the whole [issue of] global warming as such."

Lewandowski said the CO2 targets "are too ambitious for the Polish economy … Polish politicians have to persuade that there cannot be a quick jump away from coal. For Poland it would be a disaster."

His remarks were all the more pointed as the Poles at the European council blocked progress on the carbon roadmap to 2050, which the commission hoped would be the basis of a strengthening of climate policy. Poland will hold the revolving presidency of the EU from 1 July.

I love that word undermined.

I note also that Poland is in the catbird seat since the primitive superstitious Krauts received a Prophetic Vision from Planet Goddess Gaia, ordering them to stop generating electricity. The primitive superstitious Krauts will have to buy lots of coal-generated electricity from Poland, so they're no longer able to offend Poland without consequences.

Finally, Lewandowski gets a perfect endorsement from a perfect source:

Ruth Davis, chief policy adviser at Greenpeace UK, said: "It's terrifying that the man in charge of Europe's budget is someone you might expect to see in Sarah Palin's Republican party.

"He has a huge influence over all of our economic futures and yet not only does he deny the overwhelming evidence of climate change, but he's also opposing measures that leading businesses say would drive green growth and create millions of new jobs in Europe's clean industries."

When Greenpeace compares him to this year's Big Satan of the left, you know he's effective!

Most "news" stories are written in a conditional mode. They don't tell us what is actually happening, they tell us what might happen under some conditions, and try to persuade us that we can prevent the potential tragedy by reforming our sinful ways.

Conditional stories can be wrong in two different ways, as shown by examples in today's headlines. One way is "Already There", the other way is "Ain't Gonna Happen."

Plain fact, visible to anyone who has been following real events: the Arab Spring is almost entirely run by Islamists. That's the WHOLE POINT of the Arab Spring, and that's why it's popular. It's not run by "Young Democracies", despite the universal self-delusion of our ruling class and media.

You might as well ask "Should gays have a role in Broadway musicals?" or "Should blacks have a role in basketball?" or "Should murderous Satanic Communist traitors be allowed to serve as Federal judges?"

Anyone who has been following the climate issue knows (1) All predictions of mass extinction are based on ferociously obvious lies. The predictions start with grotesquely false "facts" about thousands of extinctions per year, when the real numbers are more like 2 or 3 species per year. (2) All stories about climate take false facts and extrapolate them with false theories to reach bizarre conclusions.

This particular story contains one element of truth: Overfishing is a real problem. But the countries most guilty of overfishing are Official Victim Countries under the Kyoto Treaty, exempt from all international efforts to place controls or sanctions on them. (That's a fancy way of saying "China".) The countries that can be persuaded by this tyrannical idiocy are already doing a pretty good job of controlling their own fishermen.

Conflation is one of the main techniques of effective propaganda, but it's not usually mentioned by people who claim to teach us how to spot propaganda.

Excellent example in today's UK Guardian, the leftmost of the major papers there. (The Guardian occupies the same position as nearly all "American" newspapers; Britain still has some real ideological competition among its big papers.)

Headline:

The 1847 lecture that predicted human-induced climate change

A near-forgotten speech made by a US congressman warned of global warming and the mismanagement of natural resources.

Part of the article:

More than 160 years on, it really does pay to re-read Marsh's speech as it seems remarkably prescient today. It also shows that he was decades ahead of most other thinkers on this subject. After all, he delivered his lecture a decade or more before John Tyndall began to explore the thesis that slight changes in the atmosphere's composition could cause climatic variations. And it was a full half a century before Svante Arrhenius proposed that carbon dioxide emitted by the "enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments" might warm the world (something he thought would be beneficial).

Well, when you read the speech, Marsh does talk about urban heat islands, which have been understood as long as we've had big cities; and he does talk about the bad effects of clearing forests without replanting. Both of these are real problems, real causes of changes to local and mid-scale temperature and humidity.

But Marsh doesn't say anything even remotely presaging the CO2 fraud. He says nothing about the chemistry of the atmosphere.

In other words, Marsh was right on everything. He was right about the effects of cities and clear-cutting, and he was right in not mentioning anything about carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide has nothing to do with climate.

The Guardian's attempt to put words in his mouth may succeed among the Gaians, but it's a little too obvious to succeed elsewhere.

Smell-O-Vision has been a constant goal for several decades, but very hard to achieve for one big reason: human olfaction doesn't have any measurable parameters.

Sight and sound can be measured and reproduced in a nicely systematic and parallel way. Intensity in both is logarithmic. Pitch and color are both cyclic. Both have primary values that depend on wavelength, both have a system of mixed colors and chords. This makes it possible to paint pictures by mixing single pigments or single screen dots, and to reproduce music by physically or electrically recording the ups and downs of the waves.

Color has been understood in an objective way pretty much forever, pitch for at least 300 years.

None of that applies to scent. Professional perfumers have a vocabulary of primary scents, but it's idiosyncratic and subjective, with no known way to match the scents to specific elements or molecules.

The original theater-based Smell-O-Vision was based on mounting a few pre-mixed chemicals for each movie. Expensive, ineffective and non-systematic.

In the computer age there have been a few failed efforts, and one new effort that promises to be available by the end of 2011 [Somewhat later indication: will be available in time for Christmas purchases]. ScentScape appears to have found a good set of primary chemicals from which most smells can be mixed systematically.

I'm eager to get a ScentScape gadget as soon as it comes out, because my life has been short of good smells lately. Tobacco is gone from most ambient environments, and pleasant perfumes are increasingly rare. I know the lack isn't solely my aging senses, because I occasionally catch a brief sniff of pleasant perfumes on older women who clearly stuck with their 1966 favorite scent.

As more Americans "acquire" "multiple-chemical sensitivity", good smells will disappear even more, which in turn will cause more Americans to "acquire" "multiple-chemical sensitivity". As exposure lessens, sensitivity will rise.

Why will this mainly affect good smells? The NRA principle. Employers who want to avoid MCS lawsuits will outlaw all perfumes, perfumed soaps and deodorants on the premises. Fear of MCS lawsuits will not stop the outlaw smells from tramps, babies, dogs, diesel trucks, Chinese plastic, etc.

Finally, here's what puzzles me. Most of the online opinions on ScentScape (and other computer smell devices) focus on bad smells. Some of the commenters are eager to use the device to design zombie and vampire and lizard smells, while others hate the whole idea because they can only imagine it making zombie and vampire and lizard smells. I suspect most of the commenters are gamer types who have a peculiar approach to life, but it still seems like an odd way to focus.

I'd think more people would be hungry for pleasure!

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Later thought: If a gadget like ScentScape works well, it could finally provide the basis for systematically discussing scents, not just reproducing them. Instead of giving mutually incomprehensible descriptions like "Well, it's a Woolco clothing store smell, but sort of tinged with fuel oil", you could just pass along the ScentScape code and the recipient could duplicate the smell.

= = = = =

Another note: Germans are showing the same obsession with the unpleasant. It's an amazingly consistent and universal pattern. Here's a comment on a ScentScape review in a German blog:

Update 12/22/11: Well, it's just about the end of 2011, just about Christmas, and still no indication of a release date. The device is clearly real and usable, because it's already being used in some medical experiments. But I can't find any indication of sale to the public. I hope they get it to market; would hate to see the very first literal vaporware become just another figurative vaporware!

= = = = =

Update 3/14/12: Scent Sciences is finally showing signs of preparing to release the product! They're asking for pre-order requests.
= = = = =
Update 2017: Nope, never happened. All of the Scent Sciences websites halted around 2013. No indication of further activity.

USA! USA! USA! We're Number 1! We're Number 1! We can start a war in any country we want, spend 20 years putting our soldiers and the local civilians through deadly hell, and LOSE MISERABLY! We can lose miserably in Korea! YAAAAAYYYY! We can lose supinely in Vietnam! YAAAAAAYYY! We can lose miserably TWICE in Iraq! We can lose miserably in Afghanistan! OOOORAAAAHHH!! We can lose horribly in Libya! HUZZAAAAHHH!

We can lose better than anyone else! We can consume lives and money for no purpose better than any other nation in HISTORY!We're the CHAMPION NUMBER 1 IDIOT LOSER ON ALL INHABITED PLANETS IN THE UNIVERSE!

Builders broke ground on more new homes in May, but not enough to signal a recovery in the housing market.

= = = = =

Think about the normal use of the word recovery. Let's say you had been addicted to crack for several years, outside of reality for several years, devoted solely to the drug for several years. With great effort you got 'clean and sober' for a while. Then you fell back into the habit.

Which of those stages would we call recovery? The part where you came back to reality and stopped shooting up, or the part where you relapsed and started shooting again?

Same with the economy. We were on crack for several years, overconfidently assuming that everything would be all right as long as we kept borrowing and borrowing and borrowing. In 2008 we hit bottom and recovered our sense of reality, our sense of balance. Now most of the ordinary people are instinctively trying to stay recovered, while our murderous ruling class tries to get us addicted again. They call the relapse to addiction recovery.

Unfortunately the economic crack dealers have a huge advantage over the chemical crack dealers. They own the government, the media, the vocabulary, and the "scientific" "experts". Even though we know better, the dealers will probably succeed in knocking us back into the suicidal addiction they call recovery.

Interesting piece by Sam Anderson in UK Independent, imagining the life of Sheikh Osama in his cave which disappointingly turned out to be a messy urban house.

Anderson makes one big point: Caves are the last habitable places on Earth that aren't visible to Google's all-seeing telescreen. I'd noticed this lacuna when trying to Google some of the caves I explored in Kansas, but hadn't thought of it in this light.

Caves were routine habitations in the 1800's in frontier areas and some were still used well into the '30s. Kansas has lots of undramatic and untouristy little caves in limestone bluffs, some on the banks of present rivers, others in bluffs long ago left behind by meandering creeks. (Of course there's also the dramatic SubTropolis drive-in cave in KCMO, a full-fledged underground industrial park.)

I remember one cave not far from the Mill, which had been expanded into some kind of car-repair shop of 1920 vintage. It was part of an unnamed former settlement around a Kansas River bridge at the end of Rosencutter Road. When I was exploring in the '60s the shop-cave was long abandoned but intact, and the bridge was still there but closed off. Now both are gone, though you can still see a trace of road coming from the south end of the bridge.

I've marked the bluff with a sort of yellow scratch, and the arrow points to where the shop-cave was. Frustratingly, Google's Street View drives south on Rosencutter, almost reaching this point, but turns east onto Moehlman Road.

The brand-R commentators are all weeweed up this morning over a finding that American schoolkids failed a standard history test miserably. Only 12% knew the required stuff.

Doesn't bother me at all. I'd rather have kids uninformed than disinformed by educrats. Uninformed people will be able to pick up bits of history later on, when they're mature enough to understand why it's important and interesting. Their minds won't be full of shit, so they'll be able to use their own emotions and experiences to process the knowledge.

= = = = =

School coverage of history has always been crappy, for a very good reason.

1. Curricula are designed by committees consisting of Democrats and Republicans.

2. Lists of raw facts won't stick in the mind. The only way to make history learnable is to tie the facts together into a narrative that makes a point.

3. Where the Ds and Rs disagree on the point of the narrative, they skip that part of the narrative entirely.**

4. Where the Ds and Rs agree on the point, they're both wrong.

Ideally the kids should be learning how to turn facts into history, not the half-trivial/half-wrong products of curriculum committees.

Perhaps the best solution would be to read (or watch as movies) and analyze some modern historical romance novels. Semi-fictional adventure stories that contain lots of bloody battles for the boys and lots of juicy complex family relationships for the girls.

= = = = =

** Example: When I took American History in high school in 1965, the course ended at 1945. WW2 was the last event in the curriculum. Nothing about the Korean War, the Cold War, or Vietnam; nothing about the history that had occurred during our lives. The two sides couldn't agree on how to handle those events, so the students didn't hear about them.

= = = = =

Few days later: A nice NPR feature reaches the same conclusion, and adds a larger point that Polistra has been grindingforever. American schools have always been at the bottom of the list, during times when America was successful and during the more recent decades of failure. Conclusion from this is simple and inescapable: Education is weakly and negatively correlated with national success. Our best innovators have usually been short on formal education, and our worst tyrants have usually been Yale grads.

= = = = =

And a related thought: Instead of teaching kids the utterly irrelevant details of the 1787 Constitution and the alleged structure of the "American" government, all of which is total fiction, it would be vastly more useful to teach them Parkinson's Laws of bureaucracy, along with similar observations by CP Snow and others. These are universal truths about all corporate and governmental organizations, equally true for a small city council or the North Korean Politburo. Once you understand Parkinson, you'll know how and why things happen, and you can then figure out how to change specific laws and regulations. Knowing the 1787 Constitution tells you less than nothing about any aspect of civics, because the "government" of this unfortunate land has been reading the old document inversely for at least 50 years.

In an NPR feature on sex selection in Oriental countries where boys now outnumber girls 2 to 1.

A lot of listeners may be thinking, "Wait a minute; in these countries, women don't have really good access to sex selection." But that's not true. ... There's a very different context surrounding abortion in Asia. In the U.S., a woman may have to brave picket lines to get an abortion. She may not have a clinic in her town. But in many parts of Asia abortion is readily available, and so is ultrasound.

In other words, the pro-life movement is saving lots of lives here, whether the elite baby-killers want to admit it or not.

Gender discrimination in developing nations does not fully explain the drop in the number of girls born. "You have countries where women have very low status — in the Middle East for example — and the sex ratio at birth is balanced."

Apparent contradictions tell you that you're making a bad assumption somewhere in your reasoning. Feminists assume that Muslim countries give women "low status" because they want women to dress modestly. An assumption that nobody questions, but obviously a bad assumption.

Yesterday morning an odd little phenomenon showed up. There had been a light rain earlier, just enough to dampen the streets, not enough to make a real layer of liquid. The sun was hidden behind heavy clouds. (Picture shows Mr Sun for direction reference, but he wasn't really visible.) Wind was faint, coming from the side.

The street was littered with pine cones, and every cone had dried out the surrounding pavement for about two feet, mainly toward the sun.

Shadow wouldn't explain it. If the sun had been bright, the region behind the cones would have remained wet and all the rest would be dry.

Only explanation I can think of is radiated heat. The sun-facing side of the cones must have absorbed a bit of heat, then re-radiated it toward the pavement, warming the cement just enough to evaporate.

Sen. Marco Rubio has waited five months to deliver his maiden speech. Today, finally, the Florida freshman will take to the floor.

Rubio’s key theme is American exceptionalism. “Ronald Reagan described America as a shining city on a hill,” he will say. “America never wanted to be the only shining city. We wanted our example to inspire the people of the world to build one of their own. You see, these nations, these new shining cities, they can join us, but they can never replace us. Because the light coming from them is but a reflection of our own.

“The light of an American century that now spreads throughout the earth,” he continues. “The world still needs America. The world still needs our light. It needs another American century.”

A country that no longer makes or even allows light bulbs is NOT PERMITTED to lecture other countries about light of any sort.

The only light America emits since 1989 is swamp light, the fluorescence of putrescence.

After a long drought, Professor Polistra has a real flood of misused or new words, and most of them are related to this year's perpetual flooding.

Buffalaxing:

This has been around for several years, but Prof P just got around to noticing it. Means the practice of supplying fake English "translations" for foreign songs, based on the sounds. Some are sort of dumb, but some are pure genius. Named after Buffalax, the Youtuber who started the trend.

Fragile:

Fragile wetlands, fragile deserts, fragile old-growth forests, etc. Perfectly Orwellian. When you hear an area called fragile, this is actually a command, not a description. This area has been preserving itself quite nicely for billions of years, therefore we need to commit suicide in order to preserve it, which it will do anyway because it's been preserving itself for billions of years.

Now the word is being extended to cultures and governments that have maintained themselves for a few thousand years in Asia and Africa:

"A constant refrain from these camps is that prematurely withdrawing from either country would jeopardize what Petraeus has dubbed 'fragile and reversible' security gains."

Basically, a situation is fragile if the ruling class wants the status quo to remain exactly as it stands. If the ruling class wants something to change, it's no longer fragile. It's unacceptable.

Strangely, the "British" pronunciation /frædʒaɪl/ is starting to spread, probably by analogy with turbine and missile.

Suggest:

The verb form of racist or sexist or homophobic. The media's way of signaling to other Party members that the person making the suggestion is an Enemy Of The Party.

"Last year, [Newt] suggested U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was a racist, said Obama is best understood by his 'Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,' and argued that placing a mosque near ground zero in New York City was akin to placing a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum."
"Today we ... add suggested questions sent to us by the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Foreign Policy Initiative."
"Southern Baptist theologian R. Albert Mohler, Jr. ... explaining why his weekend tweet suggested the Jewish congressman needed Jesus Christ."

Debanking:

New word for an old concept. Lots of people debanked in the '30s when they learned that banks were not a safe place to keep money. Now some people have been forcibly debanked, while others are sticking to cash out of distrust as in the '30s. [Much later: Here's a story about a time when I was debanking.]

Unnecessary plurals

"The Chinas and the Indias of the world are continuing to grow...." I suppose it makes some sense with China, because Red China and Taiwan are two Chinas, but I'm sure that wasn't in the mind of the news-writer.

"National Weather Service tells us the waters are well above flood stage." Do some rivers contain heavy water (D2O) and others contain ordinary water (H2O), and still others contain Sparkling Water?

"Those winds will be with us overnight." Are we talking about the four Greek wind gods, Boreas, Zephyrus, Eurus, and Notus?

Roll:

Verb reserved for the Mississippi. No other body of water rolls. Probably began with Old Man River.

From the Poplar Bluff newspaper reporting a flood: "More showers and thunderstorms were expected in the area on Tuesday, giving crews that worked overnight to sure-up the levee no rest."

Sure-up makes sense in the context. The workers were trying to make the levee more certain and safe. Prof P suspects this may be a local hypercorrection, common in Missoura. Teachers used to steer kids from shorely to surely, and the substitution may have spread to a word where it wasn't needed.

Much later (Sep 2013): Another use of sure-up from UK Telegraph, which couldn't have been influenced by Missoura schoolteachers: "The first man sent out by Downing Street to sure up the Tory ranks was Sam Gyimah, the Prime Minister’s affable Principal Private Secretary."
Calving off:

Flood report from Hamburg, Iowa. "The levee just started calving off. Four-foot pieces were calving off under the force of the torrent."

Texas has passed a law that nullifies Fred Upton and Bush Junior's grand theft of light bulbs. Unfortunately the law will have no real effect, because:

the measure lets any incandescent light bulb manufactured in Texas -- and sold in this state -- avoid the authority of the federal government [under] the 2007 energy independence act that starts phasing out some incandescent light bulbs next year.

No incandescent bulbs are manufactured anywhere in America, so the law is practically meaningless. ... Unless it causes some smart company to start manufacturing safe bulbs in Texas. That seems unlikely but not impossible.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is warning Africa of a creeping “new colonialism” from foreign investors and governments interested only in extracting the continent’s natural resources to enrich themselves and not the African people.

Clinton said Saturday that African leaders must ensure that foreign projects are sustainable and benefit all their citizens, not only elites. A day earlier, she cautioned that China’s massive investments and business interests in Africa need to be closely watched so that the African people are not taken advantage of.

Well, she's halfway right. The new Chinese version of colonialism is pretty much identical to the old pre-1960 colonialism. But she's creating a false choice between Chinese colonialism and American aid.

American aid is pure bribery to the elites, with no trickle-down to the masses. We pretend otherwise, but everyone knows the facts.

True colonialism, old or new, does create jobs for the masses. It's better than American aid, and the masses know it.

The real choice is between competent self-sufficiency and any type of colonialism. A truly independent country takes care of extracting its own resources and sells them on the open market to the best bidder. African leaders are innately incapable of competent leadership, so this choice isn't available in Africa. The British version of colonialism was probably the best of all the bad choices, because the Brits did try to distribute the wealth to some extent.

One of the most annoying aspects of modern partisanship is that both sides have peculiarly wrong and unchangeable images about certain parts of life. Many of these are agreed-on lies. Both sides agree that X is true; one side says this is a good thing, the other says it's bad. In fact X is false.

But some of these fixed false ideas are unique to one side. Conservatives have an especially weird set of stereotypes about education in general and college in particular. They're correct in criticizing the totalitarian impulse in 'liberal-arts' departments, but they're wrong about the basic problems with tenure and research. I've hit the tenure question often, so it's time to handle a new error.

A caller to Laura Ingraham's show made an excellent proposal. When gov't pays for development of, say, new photovoltaic cells, the present structure of research funding guarantees slow and 'chronic' progress. If we switched to the earlier system of prizes for completed projects (invented by King George 3 for research on navigation) we'd get faster and cheaper success.

The caller clearly had experience with real research.

Ingraham's sub-host missed the point entirely. He said "Yes, we need to introduce competition into research!"

No! Competition isn't the missing element. The present setup has plenty of competition in the initial choice of projects. You need a very good proposal plus very good evidence that your facility is ready and able to run the project.

The problem happens after you get the grant. At that point your incentive is to keep the project running as long as possible, with success always just around the corner. Otherwise your grad students may be unfunded for an indefinite interval until the next successful grant, and the university will have to fire the technicians who were being paid by the grant.

Best part of the prize-for-success system: It gives amateur scientists a sporting chance. If you can develop the idea on your own, running on savings or contributions, you get to enjoy the big money. If the idea truly requires expensive equipment, then academia will have the advantage.

Securitization took over culture long before it took over business and government. Before there was Goldman, there were Dada and Atonalism.

Picasso and Kandinsky and Pollock invented the CDO. Take many bits of reality, chop them up and mix them together so you can't tell what's what, and sell it for millions. If the sucker tries to guess what's in the image, sneer at him and call him a philistine, tell him that smart buyers know the infinite value of the art.

Around the same time, von Harnack securitized religion, Gödel securitized math, and Schrödinger** securitized physics. Break up the original coherent whole into unrelatable abstract bits of confetti, toss them in the air, let them fall in any random pattern, and declare this vomit to be The Real Deal. Sneer at anyone who tries to maintain the older coherency. Call them Skeptics, Deniers, Neanderthals, and Christians.

= = = = =

** Schrödinger's reality-confetti is the best of all, because it doesn't even exist until the right sort of person looks at it. It has no determinate value until a Certified Jew Physicist observes it with a Certified Non-existent Theoretical Microscope, which itself can't be seen by Skeptics and Christians.

The signature of modern times in the West is absolute total paralysis of thought. Worst example, of course, is the climate pseudoscientists, frozen in dead certainty on a murderously false hypothesis based on wildly false "facts". Paralysis also runs through most big governments and corporations, locked in an unchanging dance of decline. Governments continue expanding in size while serving no purpose at all; businesses continue expanding and raising their holy share price while making nothing at all. At the center of it all in the US is Goldman Sachs, centralizing and securitizing all aspects of life, consuming all and giving nothing in return except more theft.

Clearly the only cure for most of science, business and government is the Kuhnian cure, death of an entire generation. I pray constantly for a monstrous disaster to speed this salvation. Now that Sheikh Osama is gone, there's no hope that he will try again and get it right this time, so we can only pray for something like a Richter 20.0 earthquake that reduces the East Coast to unsurvivable rubble from Boston to Palm Beach.

However! One big exception to Kuhn seems to be popping up. Cancer researchers, despite huge vested interests in money and power, are changing their paradigm without the passing of a generation. They are pulling away from their long-held expansionist tendencies, pulling away from the rule that "the money is in the medicine, not the cure." They are restricting the definition of cancer, actually removing some conditions from their empire; and they are slicing away the Precautionary Principle that has "climatized" their field for so many years. Now they say, quite rationally, that screening for everything does more harm than good.

The Satanist-Leninist media are reporting this backwards as always, trying hard to restore the older imperial model, focusing on various interest groups who can't tolerate a departure from the Precautionary Principle. Despite that, the research community is holding steady, continuing the fast fade from imperial delusion to modest and realistic science.

We don't pay much attention to Turkey because it's stable. We should be paying more attention.

NPR notes today that Turkey's current government is highly likely to win re-election on Sunday. Why?

[Prime Minister] Erdogan is reminding voters how he kept his promise to bring Turkey's economic resurgence home to the people.

"Per capita income used to be $3,400; now we are over $10,000. Inflation used to be 30 percent; now it's down to only 4.3 percent. And we're not done yet — everything will be better, everything will be more stable," Erdogan said.

Is he right? Yes. And what's his secret? An arcane magic trick that the Anglosphere has completely forgotten:

In many ways Turkey has weathered the credit crunch better than other emerging economies. Partly thanks to tough regulation, not a single Turkish bank has gone under. That is also because, unlike many Western banks, they have few toxic assets and limited mortgage exposure. So the government has not had to divert public money into rescuing banks.

Agriculture is big:

Turkey is the world's largest producer of hazelnut, cherry, fig, apricot, quince and pomegranate; the second largest producer of watermelon, cucumber and chickpea; the third largest producer of tomato, eggplant, green pepper, lentil and pistacchio; the fourth largest producer of onion and olive; the fifth largest producer of sugar beet; the sixth largest producer of tobacco, tea and apple; the seventh largest producer of cotton and barley; the eighth largest producer of almond; the ninth largest producer of wheat, rye and grapefruit, and the tenth largest producer of lemon. Turkey has been self-sufficient in food production since the 1980s.

Manufacturing is even bigger:

By January 2005, Vestel and its rival Turkish electronics and white goods brand BEKO accounted for more than half of all TV sets manufactured in Europe.

Turkey has been building cars for many decades, beginning with assembly of American and European brands, and now mainly building its own cars and trucks.

In 2008 Turkey produced 1,147,110 motor vehicles, ranking as the 6th largest producer in Europe (behind the United Kingdom and above Italy) and the 15th largest producer in the world.

Turkey makes lots of clothing. Most of the clothing and linens in my house are from Turkey, partly because I try to avoid China.

Currently, it is one of the most important sectors in the Turkish economy, accounting for 10 percent of GDP, 20 percent of the labor force, and 40 percent of total manufacturing output. This sector is the largest in the country and it is the largest supplier of exports as well. Today, Turkey is extremely competitive in international markets and was ranked sixth in world exports of clothing in 1998.

Seems like we could stand to learn a few things from Turkey, such as how to set up a capitalist economy, how to control banks, how to make TVs, how to make clothing.

The giant pumps propelling water to some of California's biggest cities and farming districts trapped and killed 6 million young splittail last month, enraging conservation groups and further stoking the fiery debate over operation of the state's sprawling water system.

The killings are also renewing calls to relist the splittail - a native California species in the minnow family - as officially threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

I'm trying to understand this, but apparently I'm way too stupid to grasp the mystic complexities of Gaian arithmetic.

These minnows are so common that 6 million of them can be killed in one set of water pumps in one stream. So we can assume their total population is considerably larger.

And they are "endangered."

I'm trying very hard to grasp the equation:

Wildly abundant = Endangered

but I just can't comprehend it.

Obviously I'm in serious need of Gaian re-education. Take me to Room 101, please, Mr O'Brien! Bring on the rats!

The big news from the Carbon Cult this morning is a study using tree rings and other proxies, which supposedly shows a long-term decline in snowpack that corresponds to Evil Carbon. The stories tell us not to be "fooled" by the recent huge increases; we all "know" that those increases can't signal the trough of a cycle, because Nature never moves in cycles. Everything in Nature moves in linear infinite trends. Straight up to infinity or straight down to zero. No such thing as a cycle, no such thing as equilibrium created by feedback. Don't be silly, you deniers!

Here's the main graph clipped from the PDF, which doesn't seem to appear in any of the news stories:

Note that two of the regions show an abrupt step change at 1900, then no particular trend after that. The third shows no particular trend.

According to the Cult, the effects of CO2 didn't become obvious until about 1975, which also mysteriously happens to be the year when the Carbon Cult was founded.

The question should be: what happened in 1900 to those two regions but not the third? Whatever it was, it wasn't a gradual increase in anything, and it doesn't correspond to the usually given sequence for "Carbon effects".

Listening again to 'On Point' on NPR. Today's discussants are public-relations agents for the National Parks, trying to offer various arguments for increased funding.

Fortunately this is one of the rare issues where Congress and state gov'ts are already showing common sense, cutting down a luxury instead of infinitely increasing it. Nevertheless, the PR arguments for the parks are so utterly absurd that they deserve a response.

What do most Americans, especially kids, need from Nature?

They desperately need constant exercise and plenty of sunlight. They need to spend vastly more time outside the house. And they need to feel and smell and taste and handle the dirt, plants and critters in Nature. Dig in the dirt, make canals, make forts, grab earthworms, plant flowers, pull flowers, taste flowers. Get a feel for the seasons, a feel for how life responds to sun and water.

Well then, what do National Parks offer? Do they satisfy any of these needs?

First, they're distant from almost everyone, which means you must spend days in a car or hours in an airplane, using lots of petroleum, to get there. After the trip you can probably afford a day or two in the park, once a year. This is the exact opposite of constant exercise and daily sunlight.

Second, they restrict your activities. You're supposed to "leave the site cleaner than you found it". No digging or planting or cutting up critters. No direct experience allowed.

Third, they supposedly offer "majesty", whatever the hell that is. If you can't get "majesty" from seeing the place on a big TV screen, you aren't going to get "majesty" from seeing the place through your car windshield.

In short, National Parks offer none of the things we need. They are a luxury for rich people. Sell them to the rich people.

After living in this house for exactly 20 years as of today, I just now noticed that the metal siding is embossed in a simulated wood pattern. I'd always thought of it as smooth. Why did this suddenly come to my attention? Possibly because the constant wind of the last year has scoured the paint off the higher spots, making an intaglio effect.

Correction after taking another look: Actually the paint was filling in the low spots before (still is on the leeward side), and the wind has scoured out both the low spots and the high spots on the windward side to make the design visible.

We're finally getting into Spring here, with most nights above freezing and daytime temps approaching 70. Animals and plants have been wildly active lately, sensing that they need to jam their mating and growth into a short period before the heat arrives.

I sometimes wonder how it would feel to have a 3-dimensional life. Birds and squirrels handle the Y axis easily, while we're stuck on X and Z unless we get into some kind of flying machine. Birds aren't stopped by fences and walls; they can go anywhere they want in a straight line. Squirrels are more restricted, but wherever power lines or dense trees form a path, they can take the high road.

The nearest power pole has a fat Comcast line below and a delicate HV electric wire on top. Squirrels prefer the fat cable for safe street crossing, and birds like to roost in rows on the HV wire, gossiping and comparing notes. But the birds don't consider the lower cable to be a different piece of territory; the Y axis doesn't create boundaries. They harass and dive-bomb every squirrel who tries to take the Comcast road under the roosting wire. Clearly a bird's territory includes a limited horizontal area, extending all the way up and down!

Polistra has oftendissected a primary failure of our elite "scientists". Nearly everything in the biosphere, in climate or biology or psychology or economics, runs in a sigmoid pattern. It rises quickly then ramps up onto a plateau. After that it usually ramps back down to a lower plateau.

The exact internal mechanisms vary widely, but the magic of negative feedback creates a similar pattern in all these realms.

Pseudoscientists insist on treating everything as linear and infinite. If we don't stop it now, it will just keep going up and up and UP until the WORLD ENDS!!!!!

I assumed the "scientists" were so rigidly locked into abstract numerical thinking that they had never encountered physical reality, thus never encountered a feedback loop.

Richard, the EUreferendum blogger, is a trained epidemiologist. In connection with the "cucumber crisis" he points out a similar problem in epidemiology, and says that it's not ignorance at all.

Any infectious epidemic (or addiction or fad, for that matter) ramps up quickly for a while then reaches a plateau. The most vulnerable are hit first, then the increase slows as it has more trouble reaching the less vulnerable. Not everyone is affected; some people are completely immune to the germ or the pleasure. Sooner or later the epidemic (addiction, fad) will ramp back down if it's not artificially maintained by economic or governmental forces who keep it high to satisfy their greed.

Richard says that the public health authorities know this perfectly well, but prefer to advertise the straight-up-to-infinity linear threat because it enables them to "cure" the problem. If people firmly believe the disease will keep getting worse "unless we do something", then anything we do will appear to have been a solution when the epidemic inevitably ramps back down.

I've been watching episodes of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial "Purple Death from Outer Space". The movie starts with a mysterious epidemic of sudden deaths, marked by a single purple spot on the forehead. Flash Gordon's father, a Noted Scientist, establishes that the plague is caused by a powder dropped by rocket ships from the planet Mongo. Flash, who has already visited Mongo, travels up there with Prof Zarkov to solve the problem.

A bunch of stuff happens on Mongo, then about 2/3 of the way into the movie we look in on Earth to see how things are going, and to remind the viewers why Flash is doing a bunch of stuff.

Flash's father is stepping out onto a Pope-like balcony to reassure the people: "While the Purple Death still rages, there has been a marked abatement in the number of deaths. We believe this may be due to the activities of Prof Zarkov and my son Flash Gordon, on the planet Mongo. Further news will be broadcast to you the moment it is received. We again beg you to remain calm in this crisis."

The Noted Scientists go back into the building, and Second Noted Scientist says toGordon: "There was no need to raise the hopes of the people without some scrap of proof! You had no foundation for your surmise that the drop in the death rate was due to anything but natural causes!"

Third Noted Scientist says: "What of it, if it keeps up the morale of the crowd?"

Just once I'd like to see a state show some real guts. Just once a state needs to openly defy an invalid, illegitimate and unconstitutional "decision" by a Federal "judge". (Which means nearly all actions taken by Federal "judges.")

Defiance would not only be immensely satisfying, it would be the only legal action. By meekly consenting to an invalid, illegitimate and unconstitutional "decision" by a Soviet saboteur, a state is participating in treason.

For instance: California has meekly gone along with the black-robed saboteurs who ordered it to reduce prison population. California is thus an accomplice to sabotage, as well as a direct contributor to many new deaths among its non-criminal population.

Instead of lamely participating in mass murder, a valid state must remand the prisoners to the custody of all the saboteurs who created the invalid "order".

Like this:

Okay, Reinhardt! Here you go. The prison buses are now running, and they're physically depositing all the prisoners in your own bed. All 40,000 prisoners are remanded to your physical and personal custody. You are responsible for feeding and housing them, and all crimes committed by them from now on are in your name. These 40,000 prisoners are your sons.

What happens next is entirely up to you, enemy agent Reinhardt. Mobilize your fellow enemy agents in ACLU to build a new prison for your wonderful dependents. Or sleep with the 40,000 prisoners one by one. We'd really prefer to see the latter, and we'll be taping all of it for a wildly profitable reality show.

The renowned philosopher was shouted down by more than a dozen protesters during the debate about cuts to the arts at Foyles bookshop in central London.

At the end of the heated hour-long debate, during which Prof Grayling was verbally abused by students protesting against his plans, protesters set off a smoke bomb.

Prof Grayling and the three other speakers were quickly ushered from the room as it filled with pungent red smoke. Organisers were forced to evacuate about 100 people amid fears for the safety of the crowd just moments after Prof Grayling said he would talk to the protesters.

The specific subject of the dispute was sort of trivial, not the biggest of the thousand good reasons to ruin Grayling's day. Nevertheless, he richly deserved it.

Over the last few days I've noticed a sudden halt in my usual 3 readers per day. Obviously you can't draw a statistical conclusion from such a minuscule sample size, but it still indicates that blog readers were being pulled HARD in some specific direction, and thus had no energy left for the totally random wandering that brings a handful of them here from time to time.

What is the HARD pull? Must be Weiner's wiener. I haven't mentioned it for the same reason I never mention football. I find both topics utterly and absolutely devoid of all interest, and can't begin to understand how anyone could spend a microsecond on either one.

Still, the topic was sort of unavoidable, so I had to ask myself: You're rejoicing over the downfall of DSK. Why not a little faint whispered cheer over the downfall of another asshole?

Because DSK is an evil man of great consequence. His personal leadership forced several countries to starve their own people. He is a vampire. He deployed the Gramscian weapons of Diversity and Capitalism to destroy traditional cultures, drain their lifeblood, pour it into the Swiss bank accounts of other vampires.

Weiner is just a puppet. He's part of the cable-news soap opera, the loud and clangorous "fair and balanced debate" that prevents the people from focusing on real problems. He was brought down by an equally annoying asshole, this Breitbart creature, whose loyalty is highly suspect. Reminds me of David Brock.

Which of those two would I rather see in disgrace? Weiner or Breitbart? I dunno and I really don't give a fuck.

Societies facing a host of dangers are more likely to have strict social norms and be intolerant of people who deviate from them. The more secure a society, the more liberal and tolerant its people.

To find out how strict social norms are in different places, Michele Gelfand of the University of Maryland in College Park, and colleagues, surveyed 6800 people in 33 countries. They used the results to give each country a "tightness" figure, reflecting how many social norms there were and how strictly they were enforced.

"Tight" countries like India and South Korea had more and stricter social norms than "loose" countries like the Netherlands and Estonia. [Tight countries] were more likely to condemn prostitution, abortion, divorce, cheating, avoiding a fare on public transport and accepting a bribe. There was less diversity of opinion, religion was more prominent, and their governments were more autocratic.

Gelfand then pulled together data on the threats each country faced from high population density, shortages of food and clean water, pollution, natural disasters, diseases and hostile neighbours. All of these threats were more prevalent in tight countries.

Becoming socially tight may be a healthy response to threats, Gelfand says. She suggests that an embattled society might have a better chance of surviving if it became tighter.

But that doesn't necessarily follow, says Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He says it is not obvious that conformity would be a defence against so many different threats.

Gelfand's finding is pretty much a rediscovery of what everyone understood perfectly before 1968. Still, I'm happy to see a modern "social scientist" understanding and quantifying the phenomenon without self-censorship.

And here we have Thornhill again. Working hard to subvert common sense, working hard to destroy civilization. Jesus H. Roosevelt Fucking Christ. What a dangerous fucking idiot.

Luckily, the Arab world isn't reading Thornhill. They're tossing out a decadent secular ruling class and reclaiming their own version of strict civilization. The West, meanwhile, is following Thornhill into newly discovered Circles of Hell.

Every few years somebody tries to stir up a return of dirigibles / zeppelins / blimps / LTA craft / whatever you want to call them. Every few years the return amounts to nothing.

Could this finally be the chance? The latest stirrer-up is Skylite Aeronautics, with an interesting new technology. Their blimp can be raised and lowered easily, using a trick similar to a fish's swim bladder. In most blimps the helium is contained in a series of cells or inner balloons inside the main balloon. Skylite's new idea is to sandwich air cells between the helium cells. The air cells can be pumped to high compression or emptied. When the air cells are compressed, they contain a heavier gas than either ambient air or helium, pulling the blimp downward.

As with most new inventions, Skylite is pushing the "low carbon" benefits, which is of course nonsense. Without the carbon nonsense, a blimp has plenty of advantages. Use much less fuel, carry lots of weight, takeoff and land just about anywhere. The latter means less time and fuel used in driving to and from the flight, and it means a blimp can serve areas without urban facilities and airports.

If you like everything Obama is doing but hate what he says while he's doing it, I'm your man!

You like thousands of new health regulations granting complete monopoly to a few insurance companies? I'll give you millions!

You like having jobs handed to illegal immigrants and Chinese? I'll let even more Mexicans in, and I'll surrender to China even faster!

You like having the economy stolen and stuffed into the Swiss bank accounts of obscenely rich Jews? I'll steal and stuff even faster!

You like endless pointless stalemated wars in countries that didn't attack us? I'll give you even more wars, and I'll make them last a thousand years!

You like the jackboots of the marauding enemy army EPA stomping your necks? I'll stomp even harder, and my jackboots will be much more stylish and expensive than Lisa Jackson's jackboots! Fine ostrich leather, platinum cleats!

Your only problem with Obama is that he says such horrid true things on occasion. He sometimes diagnoses America's problems correctly while he's prescribing poison.

My guarantee: I won't say anything true! When I poison you, I'll say bizarrely insane things like "USA! USA! USA! We're number one! We're number one! We're number one! Best health care in the world! Best education in the world! Most freedom in the world! Shining city on the hill! Moral exemplar to the world! The fundamentals of the economy are Robust! We're EXCEPTIONAL!"

On Sunday evening, Gert Lindemann, agriculture minister in the northern state of Lower-Saxony, said a company that grew bean sprouts had been shut down and further test results were expected on Monday.

"There was a very clear trail (to this company) as the source of the infection," Mr Lindemann said in a news conference. He urged consumers in northern Germany to refrain from eating all types of sprouts.

About Me

Polistra was named after the original townsite of Manhattan (the one in Kansas). When I was growing up in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time exploring by foot, bike, and car. I discovered the ruins of an old mill along Wildcat Creek, and decided (inaccurately) that it was the remains of the original site of Polistra. Accurate or not, I've always liked the name, with its echoes of Poland (an under-appreciated friend of freedom) and stars. ==== The title icon is explained here. ==== Switchover: This 2007 entry marks a sharp change in worldview from neocon to pure populist. ===== The long illustrated story of Polistra's Dream is a time-travel fable, attempting to answer the dangerous revision of New Deal history propagated by Amity Shlaes. The Dream has 8 episodes, linked in a chain from the first. This entry explains the Shlaes connection.